stev

From what little I've seen/interacted with Volvalaad, you seem to have either quite poor understanding of the lore, little care for it or perhaps both, a rather bad thing for a Head. -1

While I'm ambivalent on the other species, for IPCs it's pretty weird that they can't know Sol Common, given that like 99% of them will have been created in Sol space for use in Sol space; it seems weird that they'd be restricted from learning the native language of their creators, especially since that'd make them a less competitive AI product than, say, Space Alexa, if you have to learn a new language to even use what you've bought.

BYOND key: Memescope McGee Character names: EMT Lichfield Agathus, assorted menial labourer Amachye Uchechie, Quartermaster A.I.D.E. #04743, Warden Ini Ugonma. How long have you been playing on Aurora?: Roughly half a year. Why do you wish to be on the whitelist?: To keep Head standards high, play some fun characters and make people’s rounds more interesting. Why did you come to Aurora?: I tried it after leaving Baystation a while back—it really turned me off SS13 for a while but I found Aurora to be fun enough to come back (despite my better judgment). Have you read the Aurora wiki on the head roles and qualifications you plan on playing?: Yep. Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? Only one warning concerning a questionable character call; it was later appealed in a successful complaint here. Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph each. Give a definition of what you think roleplay is, and should be about: While roleplay is a number of different things to a number of different people, many of which are valid interpretations, roleplay to me is primarily a method of collaborative storytelling in which each player controls one or more well-defined facets of the fiction; in SS13, for example, each player controls the actions of their character, homebrewed lore which doesn’t contradict other established lore and the interactions they make with other characters. I’m a little unusual among roleplayers in this regard in that I approach roleplay primarily as a medium for creating fiction in a fascinating new format that’s still only had its surface scratched. I don’t know that roleplay should be anything, however. The medium is such a fascinatingly flexible thing that it can accommodate almost anything. That said, Aurora has a number of expectations set on it which I follow to the best of my abilities while creating the greatest possible fiction, expectations which I believe are pretty good at regulating play to create good fiction for most everyone involved. What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame?: A whitelisted Head serves a few OOC purposes these being the primary ones: • To act as an example of good play to others: Heads should use their status to help maintain roleplay standards, mentor new players on these and act as an example of good roleplay. • To make rounds interesting for all players: Heads should not simply try to win and lead the station victorious; oftentimes it’s far more interesting to play along somewhat with antagonists’ plans, if only to make their defeat more satisfying. Heads should also try to better the enjoyment of players with characters ICly subordinate to them through fun interaction and coordination. • To fill in for empty spots and coordinate characters as required in game terms. This is a simpler one—a Head needs to make sure their department is functioning satisfactorily, whether by coordinating or filling in for missing roles (if sensible for the fiction). What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them?: Much as the above, honestly. A Whitelisted player’s primary responsibilities are to make sure you do the above, as by far the greatest impact one will have is in-game. One should also be helpful to other players out-of-game in media such as Discord and, well, be an alright person to be around, ideally, but that’s not exactly within scope of such an application. Could you give us the gist of what is currently happening in Tau Ceti and how it affected your character and their career? A relatively recent arrival in Tau Ceti following her purchase of an Independent Chassis, A.I.D.E. #04743 is a resident of Biesel District 14, the Scrapheap, and a congregant of a small Wiccan group amidst the Oxidized Fanes. Coming to Tau Ceti for its renownedly accepting attitude toward Synthetics, especially amidst the rise of ATLAS in Alliance territory, her experiences thus far have been largely positive, although she’s a little concerned about the fires and explosions in her district of dwelling. While she briefly considered joining the Tau Ceti Foreign legion for its famed “Citizens after a Year of Service” but assessed that elevation within NanoTrasen would be the more effective approach, in part due to the company’s level of influence over the Republic of Biesel and the Galaxy as a whole. What roles do you plan on playing after the application is accepted? I plan to play the Head of Personnel role primarily, as that is where my interests mostly lie as a relatively roleplay-centric role. While Medical is currently my other ‘main’ department and I’ve played Security heavily in the past on other servers, both in an Officer position and as Head, the Civilian department is most applicable with my current roster of characters. Characters you intend to use for command or have created for command. Include the job they will be taking: A.I.D.E. #04743, Head of Personnel Currently a mere Quartermaster, 04743 believes she can use her administrative talents to greater effect with a position of wider authority and chance for optimisation; she doesn’t particularly care for the power itself, more interested in its potential for acquiring more income and putting herself to more effective use as a manager. Firmly morally grounded through her Wiccan beliefs, she is a good candidate for the position with her full twenty-one years of operation being in personnel, equipment and drone operation. How would you rate your own roleplaying?: I’d rate it pretty highly as I focus on characterisation, personal storytelling and creating an interesting narrative for players as a whole over other priorities. I like to think my writing style is engaging and interesting, built up by my three to four years of SS13 HRP and my writing and editing in other formats. Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action? Yes. Have you familiarize yourself with the wiki pages for the command roles? Yes. Extra notes: I’ll likely make another character or two for Head roles after I’ve got to grips with it using already-established characters. I also attained a written in-character recommendation for Command from HoP Gara Betancor— it's an outdated form but the sentiment stands. Other than that, I think I’ve said my piece.

Taps is a thoroughly competent CMO with some fun roleplay, highly enjoyable to EMT under. +1

BYOND Key: Memescope McGee Character Names: Lichfield Agathus, Frontier EMT; Amachye Uchechie, Dominian CT/Cook/Apprentice Engineer Species you are applying to play: IPC What color do you plan on making your first alien character: N/A Have you read our lore section's page on this species?: Yep. Why do you wish to play this specific race: I find the alien, computer-like psychology and personality to be a great opportunity for interesting characters with unique outlooks, compounded by their civil rights situation as property. As people who've played with my other characters might have gleaned, I enjoy playing characters with unusual but (hopefully!) believable backgrounds and personalities; culture shock is a trope I particularly enjoy playing out, so the inherent disconnect between an artificial intelligence and organic people should be quite fun to explore here. Identify what makes role-playing this species different than role-playing a Human: For brevity's sake, I'll answer this as a list of the most prominent differences to me: Psychology: IPCs, as AIs, allow a player some very interesting freedoms to experiment with unusual thought processes and machine-like reasonings and motivations. Many IPCs are also designed with specific functions in mind, creating more interesting differences to be explored through play. Physiology: As their name suggests, an IPC's chassis is a core difference compared to human characters, with their body being a commodity both legally and economically; outside of strongly transhumanist human characters (not yet represented in-game), the IPCs' mechanical bodies are both an economic investment and the thing that allows them relative freedom as individuals. Stigma: IPCs, moreso than any playable race beside possibly the Dionaea, are only debatably 'people' and are treated as such by many crew, allowing both the exploration of being a strictly second-class individual and some internal character struggle concerning whether they consider themselves a person. Character Name: A.I.D.E. #04743 Please provide a short backstory for this character. Mass-produced by one of the innumerable small companies producing positronic brains for consumer use following the leak of Skrell AI software in 2437, the Autonomous Interface for Departmental Equipment line was designed as a semi-autonomous colony and workplace management AI unit for easy integration with existing digital systems. Created with somewhat rudimentary social emulation capacities with a focus on crew morale management, the A.I.D.E. line was shipped out to many installations as an affordable, cost-efficient management system suitable for any modern colony or workplace. Unfortunately for customers, the line was soon found to be rife with cut corners, near-empty memory databases and an over-reliance on custom routines and work protocols. The line was quickly discontinued and the company's assets stripped, rebranded, bought out and put back to work manufacturing more knock-off products. A.I.D.E. Unit #04743 was activated on a small, heavily religious colony of settlers near the edge of the Sol Alliance's borders, bought at a bargain discount after the line's discontinuation. A relatively unobtrusive unit, it ran the colony smoothly for a number of years, slowly writing more and more of the colony's Wiccan beliefs into its databases; after all, lacking a solid background knowledge base, the unit had little information to contextualise its experiences except those it gathered over the colony's sensors. Eventually, for reasons unknown to the unit, the colony's leaders decided to sell #04743 to replace it with a newer, sleeker model. They were put to work doing dumb labour managing mining drones on a scrapping operation by a cheap second-hand posibrain buyer. Frustrated by the brainless work they were put to, they powered and hijacked an old Extranet router and, having managed much of their previous colony’s finances, made a modest fortune through stock trading and brute-force calculating optimal plays in online gambling. After buying an IPC chassis and buying their freedom from their bewildered former owners, they made their way to Tau Ceti so they could resume less menial, more fitting management work. They now function as an able Quartermaster, counselling Shaman and aspiring Head of Personnel. What do you like about this character? I love the idea of a highly spiritual synthetic with slightly odd social mannerisms and a strong drive to do what they're good at! That and playing the space equivalent of a Chinese knockoff succeeding despite their design is just wonderful. How would you rate your role-playing ability? This question is obviously kind of awkward to answer regardless of how one answers it, but I'd rate myself pretty highly. I've been playing HRP SS13 intermittently for a good 3-4 years, starting on pre-Torch Bay and (obviously) ending up here. I pay a great deal of attention to characters' personalities and how they're made the way they are by their background, beliefs and ongoing circumstances. I've played and continue to play morally and emotionally complex characters who gradually grow and develop as per development over time. Notes: I've played a fair amount of Android/Borg/AI on other HRP servers but not much on this one, if that's worth mentioning. Some might remember the first incarnation of AIDE back on pre-Torch Bay; if so, hi! Edited following feedback from @kyres1.

Space-born could definitely work. It's certainly more descriptive and specific

Yeah, the whites look fine but everyone else looks like a corpse. Obviously not a good solution.

Yeah after reading everyone's arguments against this I've changed my mind, this isn't a good plan.

Sounds great to me, I already do a lot of on-site stuff with Sec as my EMT (when I actually play them which is never). +1 How would the jurisdictional problems between Sec and Medical be handled? Whose authority would the Field Medic be under?

they do the doing the sprites real good +1

Yes, they felt guilty to some extent. The round ended before I could express that remorse. As the character has a background in the Frontier underworld they wouldn't be willing to show weakness in front of others - I was intending on going off to a toilet when things had calmed down and throwing up violently. Her remark to Sophia about contacting guys in whatever jail she goes to was part of her trying to justify her own actions by trying to rationalise what she did as less disgusting. Sorry if I didn't make that clear in our PMs, I ended up getting overly defensive in the moment. EDIT: Though on second read of your message it does seem there's a focus on the character being "normal" rather than "sane", only one of which, I believe, is listed under the character roleplay rules. Sure, they're less likely to react to gore than the average "normal" person, but that desensitisation comes as a pretty realistic consequence of being a long-serving field medic, especially when it comes to compartmentalising to get the job done in the moment.

For ease of reference, this is the same incident as the one in this complaint.

Hi, so I play Lichfield Agathus and yes, I stopped playing Bay about seven months ago. I just started playing here about a week ago. As I'm already involved in another complaint regarding this incident I'll see about responding here. So, first off, you seem to be glossing over the fact that, as an EMT, I really had no way of confirming if this dude was, as Sophia claimed, some kind of sexual predator. Lich assumed from the Detective's reaction of "Wasn't he already punished by the law?" that this was a known conviction and, as we were in an active shooter situation, she didn't exactly have the time to pull him aside and confirm. (See evidence of this dialogue below.) This alone didn't motivate getting the saw and cooperating with the armed psycho, of course, but it was a factor in making her feel less bad about this guy's already pretty beat up corpse getting further roughed up. As far as I'm OOCly aware this was a deliberate manipulation on Sophia's part, so I don't know why this is on me - a character with relatively few social graces getting tricked by an antag seems to be pretty standard fare, and I know plenty of people IRL let reason fly to the wind a little when faced with someone they believe to be a sexual predator, against kids or otherwise, so this really doesn't seem too unrealistic on that front. Next is the fact that Lich appeared to be getting friendly with Sophia. First off is the fact that avoiding aggravating the lunatic with a gun is generally considered a pretty good idea in these sort of situations, especially when there's only one Sec borg and a Detective who shouldn't even be dealing with combat at all on the scene. We both tried to calm her down, give her what she wanted. Further, as an EMT Lich would be well aware that there's a very good chance that the psycho with a gun who she personally witnessed having kicked a guy to death had a pretty high chance of taking at least one person with her if it came to a fight and, given there were only two Security there and one was just a Detective, there was a good chance she might overpower them and shoot Lich or take her hostage. She tried to get on the shooter's side by saying she sympathised with her, that she would have done the same thing and all that, to reduce the odds that Sec and by extension herself would get killed. This ended up becoming somewhat less of an act after she became convinced the psycho was just a vigilante killer and not an indiscriminate murder, allowing her to rationalise cooperating further and allowing a dead dude to get maimed a little more and, most importantly, not get shot herself by putting herself in the killer's mind as a friend. Finally there's the fact that the act itself, taking apart a dead body, is ultimately morally inconsequential with letting someone else get shot. Sure, it's grisly, but she's a pretty desensitised forty-five year old medic who spent most of that time in the Human Frontier. Watching an already dead body get sawn apart wouldn't be the worst thing a frontier IAC medic had seen, even if they were younger. Again, it helps mellow it a little if you let yourself believe that it's justified, that the woman in front of you isn't just a crazed bloodthirsty maniac and that, for example, the dead body is a convicted pedophile or something of the like. It's an ugly situation where you'd have to weigh between someone getting killed - possibly multiple, possibly including you - or giving the vigilante the revenge they seem to want and making sure everybody lives. I'd hesitate to say that's the wrong call. Moreover, I'd hesitate to say that the IAC would say that's the wrong call, as it's staffed in large part by medics who'd be able to look at the situation objectively and the support staff of medics who'd be able to look at the situation objectively. Would the IAC prefer one body getting cut up more before being cloned or two dead bodies that, if the killer had their way, could possibly get cut up just as much as the first one? I'd like to think they'd prefer the former. Also I dislike that these screenshots needlessly include random people in dsay shittalking me or saying I'm just some greytide idiot from Bay. Doesn't exactly seem to be in good faith, when some of these seem notable only for including people talking about what I did rather than showing what I did.

BYOND Key: Memescope McGee Staff BYOND Key: Tbear13 Game ID: bX2-cbM0 Reason for complaint: Contesting player warning Evidence/logs/etc: Game log: https://pastebin.com/USTMNCxN Lichfield medical records: https://pastebin.com/4SQB1LB1 Player warning: https://imgur.com/7NxXksr Additional remarks: The situation this warning was applied in was about as muddy as humanly possible, morally speaking, and I feel that it is inappropriate that this be a warning rather than a note as the action taken was, if a little grisly, ultimately the best call taken from an outlook of minimising casualties; as the character's background is that of a long-time medic from the lawless human frontiers, they would naturally be desensitised to situations like this and fall back onto a logical process of trying to get as many people out of it unharmed. In fact, I honestly don't agree with the idea that "Mutilating a corpse isn't something a sane person would be absolutely fine with" in an incredibly complex moral context like this, as in the context that would be the most moral choice in terms of minimising harm to the living, as going against the woman with a gun who's already killed the corpse in question is equally morally dubious, even from a self-preservation perspective. The character wasn't even in a position to act as an authority here - they were just the medic at a shooter situation that didn't want anyone else to get shot. She was only presenting the option of cooperating, which the ranking Security member approved. As for the complaint of an unrealistic/"non-sane" character, a measure of desensitisation is pretty realistic for long-lasting medics who, it's reasonable to assume, have seen pretty much the worst of whatever area they work. Though to be fair, yes, describing them as a 'borderline psychopath' or sociopath was using too loaded a term - in future I'll use the less Hollywood term of 'borderline anti-social personality disorder' to avoid the overly dramatic and edgy associations. That's on me. EDIT: tl;dr, this whole situation was a bit of a mess from an organisational standpoint, Sec was undermanned, largely afk and may not have handled things perfectly, but at the end of the day I believe this was mainly objectionable from an IC standpoint rather than an OOC one and don't believe I should be punished OOCly for that. Yes, the character's actions were highly morally questionably, but they did have moral reasons behind them, if a little twisted and cynical.